"I never knew a world without a Hitler"

When Holocaust survivor Beatrice Karp told her eighth-grade audience that she kicked a Nazi soldier in the shin while imprisoned as a child in a concentration camp, the laughter lightened the mood somewhat in the La Vista Junior High cafeteria.

But her young listeners quickly assumed their former uneasy hush as the charming, well-dressed woman on the platform continued speaking almost effortlessly of the torrent of abuse she witnessed.

Though her delivery of grim memories was well rehearsed, occasionally a caustic edge to her voice, a clenched fist, a wrathful expression slipped free and the audience witnessed a child's rage shoving its way through her retrospection.

"I never knew a world without a Hitler," Karp told the students. "I was born in 1932 in Germany and Hitler came to power in 1933."